Portal Ventures leads $13 million into Vest's bet on sharing trader profits

Topstep's March disclosure works out to roughly 5.7% of evaluations ending in a payout. About 17% of the evaluations started in 2025 were completed, and a third of the traders who reached funded status were ever paid ^[8][19]. Vest's figure, according to the company, is about 26% of 27,000 traders, or roughly 7,000 people paid in USDC by late September ^[5][17]. The two denominators differ. Topstep's covers a full year of evaluations started, while Vest's covers a platform whose monthly active traders grew more than 300% in a month, the company says ^[6]. At that pace, more than three-quarters of the latest month's active traders were not active the month before ^[20].

Under the standard prop model, a trader pays an upfront fee for a simulated evaluation, and the firm makes money whether the trader succeeds or fails ^[7]. Vest's qualifying traders instead trade company capital on perpetual futures tied to equity indices, crypto and commodities ^[15]. They keep up to 80% of profits, or up to 95% on some account types ^[2][3]. That leaves Vest at least 20% of a winner's gains at the standard tier and at least 5% at the most generous one ^[18]. In the simplest case, where Vest absorbs each funded loss in full, its traders' gross gains must be five times their losses for the firm to break even at a 20% cut, and twenty times at 5% ^[21].

Vest also runs the perpetual futures exchange those traders use, on a real-time risk engine it calls zkRisk ^[9]. The traction numbers it published are users and volume ^[6]. If that exchange charges trading fees, volume pays Vest whether its traders win or lose. The new $13 million is going to a mobile app, hires beyond the current 22 staff and more tradable assets ^[4]. Neither Fortune nor Crypto Briefing reports how traders qualify, whether qualifying costs anything, what the exchange charges, or how much of the roughly $23 million Vest has raised backs funded accounts ^[23].

So the facts fit more than one company. If profit share makes up most of the revenue and the qualification filter holds, Vest is paid on its traders' skill, as it says. If exchange fees make up most of it, Vest is a trading venue that uses funded accounts to sign up customers. In a third case, losses on funded capital outrun the 20% cut. The obvious fix then is a qualifying fee, and that would pull Vest back toward the model its founders chose not to improve on. "Instead of trying to improve iteratively on the prop firm business, we... just said, 'How can we do this with the interests aligned with the user?'" Justin Ma, Vest's chief executive, told Fortune ^[10].

Catrina Wang, a general partner at Portal Ventures ^[16], framed the appeal around onboarding. She said the funded account, and the fact that traders can trade capital and make money without putting in their own, makes Vest highly differentiated when it comes to customer onboarding ^[11]. In my view, the evidence so far fits the venue reading at least as well as the profit-sharing one: Vest runs the exchange, it publishes volume, and its lead investor makes the case on onboarding. The 26% figure is the counter-case. If Vest shows that most of those 7,000 payouts went to traders on company capital, and that profit share is its larger revenue line, the pitch holds as stated.

The fee model is still drawing entrants. CMC Markets announced a partnership-backed program last month that pays cash rewards on simulated performance ^[13], in a sector Track360 expects to take in $850 million of revenue in 2026, up about 45% from roughly $586 million ^[12][22].